Partners Magnify the SC13 Experience

John MelonakosArrayFire, Events 1 Comment

Yesterday, we posted photos from our exhibit. Today was the last day of SC13, and we want to tip our hat to the wonderful partners that magnified our SC13 experience. Creative Consultants, Mellanox, and Allinea Creative Consultants ran an ArrayFire demo across several nodes using Mellanox interconnect. The demo was a multi-node, multi-GPU lattice boltzmann simulation. Allinea also showcased their debugging and profiling tools on the same ArrayFire based code. AMD ArrayFire OpenCL demos were showcased in the AMD exhibit. It was great to see momentum from AMD at SC13 carried over from the previous week’s APU13 conference. Microway In the photo below, you can see ArrayFire running on Microway’s WhisperStation. Microway had prime real estate at the conference and surely every …

Photos from SC13

John MelonakosArrayFire, CUDA, Events, OpenCL Leave a Comment

SC13 was awesome this week! Tomorrow is the last day of the exhibition. For those of you that did not make it to the show, here are some pictures from our exhibit: The AccelerEyes Booth ——————————————————————————————————– ArrayFire OpenCL Demo on ARM Mali ——————————————————————————————————– ArrayFire CUDA Demo on NVIDIA K40 ——————————————————————————————————– ArrayFire OpenCL Demo on Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor ——————————————————————————————————– ArrayFire OpenCL Demo on AMD FirePro GPU ——————————————————————————————————– It was a great show and wonderful to see so many ArrayFire users in person. If you could not attend and would like to learn more about our CUDA or OpenCL products or services, let us know! Related articles ArrayFire v2.0 Release Candidate Now Available for Download Two Kinds of Exhibits to Watch …

APU 2013 – Day 3 Recap

John MelonakosComputing Trends, Events, OpenCL Leave a Comment

Big announcement here at #APU13! AMD CTO, Mark Papermaster, just announced 2 additions to the 2014 Mobile APU roadmap http://t.co/sWHMhb9AAe — AMD (@AMD) November 13, 2013 Today was the final day of AMD’s APU 2013 conference. The theme of today was mostly focused on gaming topics, so it was not as relevant to technical computing as yesterday. However, the mobile product announcement from AMD in the tweet above was interesting. OpenCL is just as important in mobile computing as it is in HPC computing. Both ends of the spectrum have a need for speed and can achieve it through great data parallelism. AMD is looking to make better inroads into mobile computing with these APU announcements. Overall, APU 2013 was a fantastic …

APU 2013 – Day 1 Recap

John MelonakosEvents, OpenCL Leave a Comment

AMD’s APU 2013 kicked off today with keynotes and a welcome reception. The developer summit is themed as the epicenter of heterogeneous computing. AMD has a world class CPU and a world class GPU and is pushing the industry forward by combining both of those devices into the same chip, the APU. AMD’s APUs are programmable via OpenCL, the industry standard for heterogeneous development. AMD is also leading the way with standards for Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA). APU13 will have many technical sessions, keynotes, and demos around OpenCL and HSA. We are at the APU conference demoing ArrayFire acceleration on two of AMD’s newest hardware offerings: A machine with the latest AMD Radeon R9 209X discrete GPU A machine with the …

Beamforming with ArrayFire

ScottArrayFire, Case Studies, CUDA Leave a Comment

Alessandro Savoia and researchers at Università degli Studi Roma Tre have achieved an order of magnitude improvement in the performance of a beamforming application using ArrayFire for GPU acceleration with CUDA-capable NVIDIA GPUs. This application involves conventional beamforming. Steps include the application of a time delay to each signal vector, summation across all vectors, and processing on the result. Processing includes demodulation, envelope extraction, and logarithmic compression. ArrayFire’s functions for shifting, interpolation, and filtering made this application possible for acceleration on GPUs and reduced the time to develop significantly. Alessandro’s benchmarks show that a CPU-only version was only running at 1 frame/sec, while the ArrayFire-accelerated version was running at 10-20 frames/sec, depending on the dataset. Alessandro and his team are looking forward to …

Are You Getting Left Behind?

John MelonakosComputing Trends Leave a Comment

HPCwire posted a nice article today with trends from IDC on computer processing. These trends fall inline and corroborate things we’ve been saying here on this blog. Accelerators (including GPUs and co-processors) are taking off. Are you getting left behind? If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably at the bleeding edge, but nonetheless here are some interesting excerpts from HPCwire’s market report (go read the whole thing): “While they expected to see a jump in coprocessor and accelerator uptake, they were wholly unprepared for the overwhelming positive response to GPUs and new entrants into the market, most notably Intel’s shiny new Phi.” “Conway said that while accelerator and coprocessor adoption growth was anticipated, they had no idea that it would …

History of the Modern GPU Series

John MelonakosComputing Trends Leave a Comment

Graham Singer over at Techspot posted a series of articles a few weeks ago covering the history of the modern GPU. It is well-written and in-depth. For GPU affectionados, this is a nice read. There are 4 parts to the series: Part 1: (1976 – 1995) The Early Days of 3D Consumer Graphics Part 2: (1995 – 1999) 3Dfx Voodoo: The Game-changer Part 3: (2000 – 2006) The Nvidia vs. ATI Era Begins Part 4: (2006 – 2013) The Modern GPU: Stream processing units a.k.a. GPGPU Enjoy!

7 Highlights of GTC 2013 – Day 4 of 4

John MelonakosEvents Leave a Comment

Day 4 at GTC is always a little less hyped than the first 3 days, but it is when some of the best sessions are found. Here are 7 of the highlights we’ve collected from our team on the last day of GTC 2013: Paulius Micikevicius of NVIDIA gave a great talk entitled, “Performance Optimization: Programming Guidelines and GPU Architecture Details Behind Them.” It was so great, we have 2 highlights from this talk. The first Paulius highlight is the information about how instruction level parallelism is essential to fully take advantage of Kepler GPUs. Paulius gave a clear presentation on these difficult concepts. The second Paulius highlight is the thorough treatment of memory hierarchy for Kepler. It is very detailed and …

Heterogeneous Computing Trends for Dummies

John MelonakosComputing Trends Leave a Comment

Ten days ago, I posted an article on CPU Processing Trends for Dummies. Today, I continue that series with an article describing the latest major trend in computing, namely Heterogeneous Computing. The Point The point of these articles is to paint the high-level picture for trends in computer processing. I hope this bigger picture will help summarize things for those that do not breathe computer processors and technical software on a daily basis. Over the last 20 years, big gains in computer processing have been defined by increases in CPU clock speeds, then by increases in the number of CPU cores. The next 10+ years will be defined by heterogeneous computing. Heterogeneous Computing So let’s start with a definition:  Heterogeneous …

CPU Processing Trends for Dummies

John MelonakosComputing Trends Leave a Comment

Over the years at AccelerEyes, it has been surprising to me how many people miss a big picture understanding of the trends affecting the computing industry. To help, I’m going to post a few articles with high-level explanations. I’m going to do so in a hand-wavy manner. I look forward in advance to the lively comments on my mistakes. But, in general, I think these posts will be a fairly accurate view of the important trends. Today, I’ll start by talking about CPU processing trends. Let’s start with something we all know:  CPUs are central processing units and are the main processor in the computer. You probably had to label the CPU on a diagram at some point in grade school, …